NOTES.
[1] — The following quotation is from the “Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1603-1610,” p. 254: — “Nov. 13 (1605) Declaration of Fras. Tresham — Catesby revealed the Plot to him on October 14th: he opposed it: urged at least its postponement, and offered him money to leave the kingdom with his companions: thought they were gone, and intended to reveal the Treason; has been guilty of concealment, but, as he had no hand in the Plot, he throws himself on the King’s mercy.”
Now surely it stands to reason that if Tresham had penned the Letter — Litteræ Felicissimæ — he would have never addressed his Sovereign thus. He would have triumphantly gloried in the effort of his pen, and “worked” (as the phrase goes) “his beneficent action for all that it was worth.” Tresham was held back by the omnipotence of the impossible; anybody can see that who reads his evidence.
Besides Mounteagle, Tresham (who died of a painful disease, strangurion, in the Tower 23rd December, 1605) probably would have had a powerful (if bribed) friend in the Earl of Suffolk. Hence his friends saying that had he lived they feared not the course of Justice. The Earl of Suffolk was a son of Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk, by his second wife, Margaret Audley, the heiress of Sir Thomas Audley, of Walden, Essex. The Duke was beheaded in 1572 for aspiring to the hand of James the First’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots. It is to James’s credit that he seems to have treated the Howard family, in its various branches, with marked consideration, after ascending the English Throne. Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk’s first wife was the heiress of the then last Earl of Arundel, Lady Mary Fitzalan. She left one son, Philip, who became the well-known Philip Howard Earl of Arundel and Surrey.
[2] — In 1568 a Commission was appointed which sat at York to hear the causes of the differences which had arisen between the Scottish Queen and her subjects. Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk presided over this Commission, and the late lamented Bishop Creighton, in his fascinating biography of
Queen Elizabeth, thinks that the proposal that Mary Stuart should be married to Norfolk came from the Scottish side at York on this occasion. Whatever may be the true history and character of Mary Queen of Scots, in clearness of mind she excelled her Royal cousin of England, that wonderful child of the Renaissance, poor, pathetic, lonely, yet marvellous, “Bess,” who for 342 years, even from the grave, has ruled one aspect of English ecclesiastical life.[A] Moreover, I am of opinion that the Scots’ Queen showed a singular tolerance of spirit towards the holders of theological opinions the contradictory of her own, whilst at the same time continuing constantly established in her own tenure of what she believed to be the Truth: indeed a tolerance of spirit, combined with a personal steadfastness, reached only by the very choicest spirits of that or any succeeding age.
Tolerance is not a simple but a compound product; and its attainment is especially difficult to women by reason of the essential intensity of their nature. Tolerance is a habit born of a consciousness of intellectual strength and moral power. It is a manifestation of that princely gift and grace which “becomes a monarch better than his crown.” It ought to be the birthright and peculiar characteristic of all that know (and therefore believe) they have a living possession of the Absolute and Everlasting Truth. In the interests of our common Humanity, all who think that their strength is as the “strength of ten,” because their “faith” (whatever may be the case with their “works”) is “pure,” should seek to place on an intellectual foundation, sure and steadfast, the principle, the grand principle, considered in so many of its concrete results, of religious toleration: a principle which England has exhibited in its practical working to the world: but rather as the conclusion of the unconscious logic of events than the conscious logic of the mind of man. Now this latter kind of logic alone, because it is idealistic, can give permanency; the former kind, being primarily materialistic, will inevitably sooner or later go “the way of all flesh;” and we know what that is.
The ideas of Truth and Right imply a oneness or unity. Now unity is the opposite of multiplicity, and, therefore, the contrary of division and distinction. One must rule men by virtue of the prerogatives of Truth and Right when these are ascertained. The problem at the root of the terrible conflict on the veldt of South Africa since 11th October, 1899, to the present time, 26th October, 1901, involves this question of the unity that is implied in the ideas of Truth and Right. For those ideas are the
originating causes, the moving springs, the ultimate justification, and the final vindication of all true and just claims to paramountcy and sovereignty everywhere. But who is to determine which side has Truth and Right, and, therefore, the true and the just claim to paramountcy and sovereignty in South Africa?